quarta-feira, junho 21, 2006

And you are waiting, expecting the one, that infinitely enriches your life; the mighty, tremendous, the awakening of the stones, dephts, turned to you. Dozing in the bookshelves Are volumes in gold and brown; and you are thinking of lands you’ve passed through, of images, of the garments of, re-lost women.

And suddenly you realize: this was it. You rise to your feet and before you stands, a past year’s fear and guise and prayer.

"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

quinta-feira, junho 15, 2006

"As ever, inauthentic, fallen Dasein is dispersed in the world of the present: 'Lost in the making present of the "today", it understands the "past" in terms of the "Present"' (BT, 391) - and not, as authentic Dasein does, in terms of the future, of its own fate."

I walked to a neighbouring town; and sat down upon a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep pause about the most fearful state my sin had brought me to; and, after long musing, I lifted up my head; but methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light; and as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did band themselves against me. Me thought that they all combined together to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and unfit to dwell among them, because I had sinned against the Saviour. Oh, how happy now was every creature over I for they stood fast, and kept their station. But I was gone and lost.

“In any case a man does not have an unrestricted power to decide whether or not to be. He may choose to die, but he cannot choose to be born, or to be born in one situation rather than another. He is, as Heidegger puts it, 'thrown' into the world.”

quarta-feira, junho 14, 2006

ARCHAEOLOGY studies all changes in the material world that are due to human action--naturally in so far as they survive. The archæological record is constituted of the fossilized results of human behaviour, and it is the archæologist's business to reconstitute that behaviour as far as he can and so to recapture the thoughts that behaviour expressed. In so far as he can do that, he becomes an historian. The aim of this book is therefore to explain how archæologists order their data to form a record and how they may try to interpret them as concrete embodiments of thoughts.

The most familiar surviving results of behaviour are of course the things men have made or unmade which may be called artifacts. These include on the one hand tools, weapons, personal ornaments, charms, statuettes, and on the other farm-houses, temples, castles, canals, mineshafts, graves. It is convenient to divide artifacts into two classes--relics and monuments. The former are portable and can be removed to a museum or laboratory for study. Monuments are either earth-fast or too massive to remove and have to be studied on the spot. But not all archæological data belong to one or other of these classes, nor can be called artifacts at all. A Mediterranean shell found in a reindeer hunter's cave in Central France is not an artifact, not having itself been altered by man. But its presence in Central France several hundred miles from its nearest natural habitat is a result of human action and as such an archæological datum; for shells do not fly and no known natural agency would carry the cowrie shell from the Gulf of Lions to the valley of the Vezère that flows into the Bay of Biscay. So its transport is a very significant archæological phenomenon.

Again the interment of a body, crouched on its left side facing south, is the result of human action, but cannot be called an artifact. One house in the Late Bronze Age village of Buchau was twice as big as all the rest and more elaborate in construction. Such relations between monuments or relics are very significant archæological phenomena from which historical inferences can be drawn, but are themselves neither monuments nor relics. The relations of monuments and relics to the non-human environment too may be archæological data. The location of settlements in relation to good fishing grounds, to easily cultivable soil or to sheltered harbours may give a decisive clue as to the activities and economy of the settlers. The natural environment is at once an incentive and a limit to human action. At the same time man's intervention may itself profoundly affect the environment, exterminating some animals and introducing others, clearing forests and turning grassy steppes into dustbowls. These changes are strictly the result of human action, but cannot usually be defined by normal archæological techniques, but only with the aid of methods devised by the natural sciences--botany, zoology, climatology and geology. And their aid must be invoked too in determining the unmodified environment which, quite apart from human intervention, has undergone vast changes during the period of man's existence on the earth. The importance for archæology of these phenomena that must be studied by other disciplines has been recognized in the University of London by the creation of a Department of Environmental Archæology--a precedent followed by other universities in Britain and on the Continent

domingo, junho 11, 2006

"Nevertheless, the fact remains that hunter-gatherers do build shelters of various kinds. So who are we to say that they have no architecture? And if they do not, how are we to comprehend their building activity?"

(...)

"Building, then, is a process that is continually going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment. It does not begin here, with a pre-formed plan, and end there, with a finished artefact. The 'final form' is but a fleeting moment in the life of any feature, when it is matched to a human purpose, likewise cut out from the flow of intentional activity."

(...)

"For it is in the very process of dwelling that we build."

In Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling & Skill

sábado, junho 10, 2006

In lovely blue the steeple blossoms With its metal roof. Around which Drift swallow cries, around which Lies most loving blue. The sun, High overhead, tints the roof tin, But up in the wind, silent, The weathercock crows. When someone Takes the stairs down from the belfry, It is a still life, with the figure Thus detached, the sculpted shape Of man comes forth. The windows The bells ring through Are as gates to beauty. Because gates Still take after nature, They resemble the forest trees. But purity is also beauty. A grave spirit arises from within, Out of divers things. Yet so simple These images, so very holy, One fears to describe them. But the gods, Ever kind in all things, Are rich in virtue and joy. Which man may imitate. May a man look up From the utter hardship of his life And say: Let me also be Like these? Yes. As long as kindness lasts, Pure, within his heart, he may gladly measure himself Against the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend To believe. Such is man’s measure. Well deserving, yet poetically Man dwells on this earth. But the shadow Of the starry night is no more pure, if I may say so, Than man, said to be the image of God. Is there measure on earth? There is None. No created world ever hindered The course of thunder. A flower Is likewise lovely, blooming as it does Under the sun. The eye often discovers Creatures in life it would be yet lovelier To name than flowers. O, this I know! For to bleed both in body and heart, and cease To be whole, is this pleasing to God? But the soul, I believe, must Remain pure, lest the eagle wing Its way up to the Almighty with songs Of praise and the voice of so many birds. It is substance, and is form. Lovely little brook, how moving you seem As you roll so clear, like the eye of God, Through the Milky Way. I know you well, But tears pour from the eye. I see gaiety of life blossom About me in all creation’s forms, I do not compare it cheaply To the graveyard’s solitary doves. People’s Laughter seems to grieve me, After all, I have a heart. Would I like to be a comet? I think so. They are swift as birds, they flower With fire, childlike in purity. To desire More than this is beyond human measure. The gaiety of virtue also deserves praise From the grave spirit adrift Between the garden’s three columns. A beautiful virgin should wreathe her hair With myrtle, being simple by nature and heart. But myrtles are found in Greece. If a man look into a mirror And see his image therein, as if painted, It is his likeness. Man’s image has eyes, But the moon has light. King Oedipus may have an eye too many. The sufferings of this man seem indescribable, Inexpressible, unspeakable. Which comes When drama represents such things. But what do I feel, now thinking of you? Like brooks, I am carried away by the end of something That expands like Asia. Of course, Oedipus suffers the same? For a reason, Of course. Did Hercules suffer as well? Indeed. In their friendship Did not the Dioscuri also suffer? Yes, to battle God as Hercules did Is to suffer. And to half share immortality With the envy of this life, This too is pain. But this also Is suffering, when a man is covered with summer freckles, All bespattered with spots. This is the work Of the gun, it draws everything out. It leads young men along their course, Charmed by rays like roses. The sufferings of Oedipus seem like a poor man Lamenting what he lacks. Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece. Life is death, and death a life.

“What domesticity regulated — savagery — it demanded. It had to have its off¬stage within itself. The stories it tells speak only of that, of the seditio smouldering up at its heart. Solitude is seditio. Love is seditio. All love is criminal. It has no concern for the regulation of services, places, moments. And the solitude of the adolescent in the domus is seditious because in the suspense of its melancholy it bears the whole order of nature and culture. In the secrecy of his bedroom, he inscribes upon nothing, on the intimate surface of his diary, the idea of another house, of the vanity of any house. Like Orwell's Winston, he inscribes the drama of his incapacity before the law. Like Kafka. And lovers do not even have anything to tell. They are committed to deixis: this, now, yesterday, you. Committed to presence, deprived of representation. But the domus made legends and representations out of these silences and these inscriptions. In place of which the megalopolis displays, commentates on them, and explains them, makes them communicable. It calls melancholy being autistic and love sex. Like the way that it calls fruges agro-alimentry products. Secrets must be put into circuits, writings programmed, tragedies transcribed into bits of information. Protocols of transparency, scenarios of operationality. After all, I'll take it, your domus, it's saleable, your nostalgia, your love, let me get on with it. It might come in useful. The secret is capitalized swiftly and efficiently. But that the secret should be a secret of nothing, be uncultivated, senseless, already in the domus, the megalopolis has no idea. Or rather, it has only the idea. Whereas the secret, because it consists only in the timbre of a sensitive, sentimental matter, is inaccessible except to stupor.

I wanted to say only this, it seems. Not that the domus is the figure of community that can provide an alternative to the megapolis. Domesticy is over, and probably it never existed, except as a dream of the old child awakening and destroying it on awakening.”

LYOTARD, Jean-François (1991) - Domus and the Megalopolis The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Stanford University Press

This is Ground Control to Major TomYou’ve really made the gradeAnd the papers want to know whose shirts you wearNow it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare

“This is Major Tom to Ground ControlI’m stepping through the doorAnd I’m floating in a most peculiar wayAnd the stars look very different today

For hereAm I sitting in a tin canFar above the worldPlanet Earth is blueAnd there’s nothing I can do

Though I’m past one hundred thousand milesI’m feeling very stillAnd I think my spaceship knows which way to goTell my wife I love her very much (she knows!)Ground Control to Major TomYour circuit’s dead, there’s something wrongCan you hear me, Major Tom?Can you hear me, Major Tom?Can you hear me, Major Tom?Can you hear....